Head Case

by Cole Cohen

  I make it up as I go along, artlessly lobbing different pedagogical tactics: joking, cajoling, threatening. I feel less like a teacher and more like a basketball coach in an uplifting sports movie, taking my ragtag team of colorful underdogs all the way to the pennant.

  Some days, inevitably, are better than others. Some days I even get the sense that I know what I’m doing; those days feel like a homecoming. As overwhelmed as I am by the brain’s potential to unravel, I am more moved by its elasticity.

  Writing Arts: Twentieth-Century Art Movements and Society Syllabus

  Course #: CS110

  COURSE DESCRIPTION

  In the Wednesday discussion section of this course, we will be focusing on the twentieth-century avant-garde art movements presented in the lecture period and polishing our essay-writing skills by writing about certain works and artists of the era. You will be assigned three critical essays throughout the course of the semester. I will update you on paper topics, guidelines, and formatting as the first assignment approaches. You will be expected to turn in a rough draft as well as a revision of each piece.

  CRITICAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT POLICIES

  Plagiarism Policy: As discussed in Professor Nelson’s original syllabus, CalArts has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to plagiarism; possible consequences of suspected plagiarism include failure in class and expulsion from the school. Plagiarism is identified as misrepresentation of someone else’s work as your own.

  (I am the only plagiarist here, the fake, the phony, standing in front of the twelve of you as if I know what I’m doing because I have a syllabus, a cup of coffee, and a blazer. I look like the real thing, but inside I can’t believe that I’m getting away with this. The worst part is, I’m falling in love with teaching, so I hope that I’m never found out.)

  Absences: You receive three absences, both in Professor Nelson’s lecture and my class section. It is especially important that you be aware of your absences, as this class can only be retaken for your mandatory graduation credit at a community college over the summer.

  Reading: The reader may be purchased at www.universityreaders.com. I expect you to buy this reader ASAP and bring it to class every week. Reading should be completed before lecture on Tuesday, in order to get the most out of the week’s lecture.

  Grading: (How am I going to do this? The organizing, the rubric—don’t let them smell fear; keep a calm and steady grip. Show authority, not vulnerability. They don’t need to know. Nobody needs to know. Hide, reveal, retreat.) Check marks for handing in a three-by-five card with three questions: two from reading and one from lecture. Check marks for participation, for attendance. Check marks for having a thesis statement, for MLA formatting, a proper citations page. Data collected via check marks make up your paper grade as well as your ultimate grade.

  Goals: I have been collecting blazers from Goodwill for years in anticipation of becoming a teacher. If I try to open the door with the hand that is also holding my coffee, make the wrong amount of copies or staple them backward, if I forget simple words midsentence and ask for the class’s help, may I please remind you: I got this. I know all of your names, I researched discussion topics and prepared lectures. I will work harder than you will ever know.

  Outcome: You will learn things you didn’t know before; you will be challenged. For ninety minutes twice a week I will be a conduit instead of a charge.

  October 2008

  Valencia, California

  All of the students have impossible expectations for the CalArts Halloween party. We’ve all heard the story about Paul Reubens passing out on the lawn, about the beer laced with hallucinogens. I’m dressed in a Harlem Globetrotters cheerleader uniform from the 1970s and a grotesque rubber mask of a chicken that I picked up at a toy store in Seattle. I tell inquirers that I’m a “party fowl.” The mask is incredibly hot, and I can only see through holes in the beak, which creates the effect of watching the party through a telescopic lens. When the girl before me in the crushing line for drinks drops a beer on herself, an art student dressed as a giant box of tissues mops her up before disappearing back into the swarm of the party.

  Feeling overwhelmed by the crowd, I retreat with a few other writing students to the concrete hut at the end of the campus that houses our program. We’re all acutely aware that our thesis defenses are only days away, but tonight is supposed to be about forgetting. Very few of the male writing students have dressed up this year. The man I’m sitting next to, a new student whom I haven’t talked to much outside of class, is in his street clothes, a baseball cap jammed backward on his head.

  I’ve noticed how authoritatively he remarks on other students’ work in class; every so often his feedback is stalled by a stutter. When he gets stuck on a word, I feel ashamed because I don’t know where to put my eyes. Blankly watching him stuck looping a syllable until his body allows him to right himself feels as though I’m adding pressure to the situation. I want to be able to help somehow, to run behind him and Heimlich the words out of him. I usually look down at my desk and wait.

  I know what it is to be angry with your uncooperative body. Your body will inevitably fail you—if not now, then later. We are all lurching meat marionettes, Frankenstein monsters stitched together from stronger parts and weaker parts. Try to think of this as a happy thing, a joyful coltish clumsiness born of enthusiasm to be in the world.

  I’ve taken off my chicken mask to facilitate drinking. He also has a beer in his hand.

  “So, what’s your thesis project?” he asks me, making polite party conversation.

  “Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “Ask me tomorrow.”

  “No, no, tell me, what is it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Talking about my thesis sucks all the air out of the room; it’s a conversation stopper, not exactly party chatter. But he persists, so I tell him, certain that afterward he will back off immediately.

  “I have a hole in my brain. I’m writing about that.”

  “Well, I suppose I should congratulate you on being able to dress yourself, then.”

  He’s smirking. This is a joke.

  I look around the small room, which has grown quiet. One girl sitting on the floor in the corner awkwardly plays with the brim of her witch hat. The students are waiting to see if the man and I are going to fight, but I’m stunned into silence. I had assumed that he and I were somehow on the same team, this imaginary team of people who are forced to play the hand they’re dealt, instead of two individuals who barely know each other.

  The next day, unbeknownst to me, one of my friends in the program tells him that he needs to apologize to me. He does, in a very thorough and touching email.

  The Thursday after the party, I will have to defend my thesis proposal by sitting in front of my class of twenty-five students and a panel of professors and discussing my process, my intentions. In trying to practice how I would answer their questions, I only come up with more of my own.

  When I trip and fall, is that also when you would trip and fall? When I am certain that the car heading toward me will hit me, is it a justifiable fear? Do you drop your keys? Does a cup fall from your hand as often it falls from mine? Which hand? How often? Please record. When I feel comfortable in my body, is that the comfort you feel in yours? Because feeling comfortable in my body never feels the way I think it should feel.

  On Thursday evening, I am scheduled to be the first to present my thesis proposal after break. During the break, I head to the water fountain, where I swallow a muddy rainbow of herbal antianxiety pills with names both beautiful and meaningless to me: rhodiola, cordyceps, taurine.

  My adviser grips the skinny microphone and flashes a fiberglass smile in a sharkskin suit and shiny black dress shoes. Now it’s time to play a game! The studio audience shuffles in from break. I take my seat and place my hand above the buzzer. The topics on the board include: “Is That Why
You’re Such a Bitch in Workshop?” “Are You Going to Publish This, or Is It Just Therapy?” and “Is It Fatal?” A hand goes up.

  “So, is this, like, specific to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, are you, like, the only person who has this?”

  I explain that it’s like stroke damage; each stroke results in a uniquely devastated neurological system. I didn’t have a stroke, but what I have is unique to me, and I have not been able to find anyone else, via my Web research, with a hole filled with cranial fluid where the right parietal should be.

  Another hand goes up.

  “I just can’t believe it’s the size of a lemon. I mean, a lemon.”

  She pumps her fist in the air repeatedly, as you do when you pass a truck and you want the driver to blow the horn. I fail to decipher this motion, either some sort of call to arms or act of solidarity, or she’s going to shake me down for my lunch money after class. I nod and thank her.

  A hush falls over the class, signaling the end of the questions. I am thanked by my adviser and dismissed. Afterward, I go out with friends from class to an aggressively festive chain restaurant, where we drink everything there is to drink in every shape of glass there is made to hold it: a fishbowl, a volcano, a hurricane.

  * * *

  Come on, it’s not that bad. You’re really milking this, aren’t you? This is really more of a self-esteem issue. I remember that one time when I said “left” and you went left, when I asked you for change and you counted it out, when I pointed to a clock and you nodded, when we lost the car and you found it, when I was feeling down and you kept patting me on the back. This is a bit much, isn’t it? Don’t you think this is really a bit much? Really. I hang out with you all the time, and this, this is bullshit, this is a lie, you are a liar, this is all fake, and you, well, obviously You Are a Fraud.

  (I’m afraid of what my friends will say. I’m afraid that they won’t believe me.)

  February 2009

  Redlands, California

  The word nostalgia was originally a medical diagnosis. In the eighteenth century, nostalgia was diagnosed as a physical illness afflicting people who’d left the homeland that their body had grown accustomed to. Pathopatridalgia. Patho, the Latin root meaning “suffering”; patri, meaning “land of the father.” From Latin to Greek, the root becomes nostos, “returning home,” and algos, “pain.”

  Is this the pain of yearning for home or the pain of returning home? Nostalgia is a masochistic twinge, a need akin to wobbling the rickety tooth in your mouth in order to sort through the pain. Yep, still hurts. Damn, I should get this checked out. Maybe tomorrow it will feel better; maybe if I just leave it alone. But you are absently worrying that wobbly tooth again without meaning to or thinking about it. It feels inexplicably good. Without meaning to or really thinking about it, you can find yourself jostling around your past for no good reason, not knowing what you are looking for. An old record, a meal at a familiar restaurant, a message from out of the blue, and there you are; twisting and contorting to get closer to the pain, to try to figure out its nature and origins, its roots. Diagnosis is a systematic labeling, an identification. Over time, the meaning of nostalgia has shifted from something solid—a diagnosis rooted in place—to something much more abstract: a yearning rooted in time.

  “What are you doing next week?” I ask Charlie.

  Valentine’s Day is embedded in the coming week, but I don’t ask, “What do you want to do for Valentine’s Day?” or, worse, “What are we doing for Valentine’s Day?”

  That would imply that I cared, that we cared, about such things. Valentine’s Day encompasses everything that I am trying not to be. It’s a needy, soppy, expectant, frilly holiday; a pink codependent holiday, and I am a blue independent woman.

  “Well, there’s this concert, and Robert’s going to be unveiling this robot he built to sing along to ‘Suck My Giant Robot Dick,’ and it has, like, this gigantic phallus that goes up and down while he sings. It’s going to be awesome. I don’t know if I’d be able to pick you up from Valencia in time fo—”

  “Dude. You cannot leave me alone on Valentine’s Day for a giant robot phallus.”

  “Oh. OK. Why, what’s up?”

  “The Johnston reunion is that weekend. I was wondering if you’d want to go with me?”

  “To your college reunion with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, man, I don’t know. That sounds … intense.”

  “Peter will be there; you love Peter. And Kristy and Matt—I mean Maddie.”

  The Johnston reunion, which is held once every five years in Redlands and welcomes everyone from any class dating back to 1976, happens to fall in my second year of grad school. Valencia is only a couple of hours from Redlands by car. I am bringing Charlie to silently ask for my little community’s blessing; I need him to meet Maddie. Although I can’t admit it to myself at the time, what I’m really saying by dragging my long-term boyfriend to my five-year college reunion is “Look at me! Here I am, five years after college graduation and finally in a stable relationship! I must be doing something right. I must be an adult now.”

  Maddie, whom I dated on and off during college, is one of the people I’m most looking forward to seeing. Maddie is the convex to my concave: extroverted, outgoing, a social butterfly. Still, we were unmistakably a pair, both curious and brutally impatient. Together, we sledded down the concrete stairs of our dorm on couch cushions and broke into the school church in the middle of the night to play the organ, nothing especially new in the world of college hijinks, but we felt we were inventing the world.

  Maddie was the first person I had called about my brain. She said, “You mean this whole time that’s all it was?” As if it was so simple, which somehow made me feel much better. A year later she called me right after she got her first estrogen shot.

  She and I are both coming back to Johnston with different bodies, bodies truer to our selves. Mine is a secret self, hidden like a blister in a shoe. Maddie’s transformation is external and highly public, Matt to Maddie. Our only sameness is that our new bodies are rooted in a physical and emotional history that was incongruent with our external selves.

  I don’t presume to know what Maddie’s transition is like for her; I do know a little about being the unwilling captive of a body that performs a pantomime of fulfilling the expectations of others. I have loved a pantomime of her body when we dated in college, watched those shoulders slope in sleep.

  Maddie dresses like a punk-rock Frida Kahlo in skirts sewn together in thick, bold railroad-track stitches, feathers and plastic flowers in her hair. She has breasts, hips, and a new tattoo on her inner forearm, a Russian nesting doll. Stacking selves within selves—it’s what we’ve all done in the five years since we graduated from Johnston.

  Right now her voice still has the same deep tone that it had when we were in college, but her inflections have started to change, twisting the periods that used to end each sentence into question marks. Eventually, the tone of her voice will also change.

  Several of us are staying at the Stardust Motel, a collection of run-down rooms that’s not without its charms, one being that it is in drunken stumbling distance from campus; another being the avocado rotary phones and the framed paintings of unicorns on the wall that look like they were ripped out of children’s drawing books.

  All of our bodies have changed, of course. Some of us are fatter, and fewer of us are thinner; some have less hair, and some stopped shaving. A few have had babies—one woman who lives in Redlands brings her two young children and husband. My last vivid memory of her prior to the reunion is of when she was tripping on mushrooms, hanging herself out the third-floor dorm window in a hot-pink bikini crying and screaming and threatening to jump, while several people grabbed her by the arms and waist to try to pull her back inside.

  A few of us assemble at the house of our former writing professor for some tea and biscuits and to catch up and play with her dogs. As
I leave the party, Maddie pulls me in for a hug good-bye and whispers in my ear, “I like him. He’s a sweetheart.”

  IV. Arrival

  “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  May 2009

  Valencia, California

  I am here to collect.

  As the star of my own vengeful action thriller, The Claimant, I want my identity back, someone’s head on a platter for making me wait twenty-seven years to find out who I am, someone else’s head on a platter for how little this new information about me actually changes me. I want your help, and I want nothing to do with you. I am The Claimant.

  I’ll be graduating from my MFA program in a month, and while I feel both a bit of relief and perhaps even some validation now that I know why I was such a bad fit at my postcollege jobs, I don’t know where this leaves me now, other than unfit for the same jobs that I assumed that I’d return to after finishing my MFA.

  I try to think of applying for Social Security as a temporary stopgap measure that allows me to remain independent while figuring out where I fit into the workforce. More than anything, I want to teach writing, but I know that those positions are hard to come by even in the best of times. Even if I wasn’t graduating in a recession, it’s rare for anyone coming straight out of an MFA program to go straight into teaching. The MFA is a studio degree, giving us time to work on our writing and practice teaching for the first time. After graduation, some of us will go on to PhD programs; some of us will adjunct at community colleges; most of us will go back to the jobs we had before we took two years to focus on writing. I don’t know what I’m going to do after graduation. Charlie doesn’t want me to move in with him in Santa Barbara, and I don’t want to go back to my parents’ house in Portland. I’ve been putting out some feelers with friends who live in the Bay Area, but if this claim doesn’t go through I’ll have to go back to my parents’.